The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

In The Shadow Factory, James Bamford, the foremost expert on National Security Agency, charts its transformation since 9/11, as the legendary code breakers turned their ears away from outside enemies, such as the Soviet Union, and inward to enemies whose communications increasingly crisscross America.

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror

An unprecedented high-level master narrative of America's intelligence wars from the only person ever to helm both the CIA and NSA, at a time of heinous new threats and wrenching change. For General Michael Hayden, playing to the edge means playing so close to the line that you get chalk dust on your cleats. Otherwise, by playing back, you may protect yourself, but you will be less successful in protecting America.

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

Pulitzer Prize, General nonfiction, 2016. When Jordan granted amnesty to a group of political prisoners in 1999, it little realized that among them was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist mastermind and soon the architect of an Islamist movement bent on dominating the Middle East. In Black Flags, an unprecedented account of the rise of ISIS, Joby Warrick shows how the zeal of this one man and the strategic mistakes of Presidents Bush and Obama led to the banner of ISIS being raised over huge swaths of Syria and Iraq.

Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage

As the digital era becomes increasingly pervasive, the intertwining forces of computers and espionage are reshaping the entire world; what was once the preserve of a few intelligence agencies now affects us all. Corera's compelling narrative takes us from the Second World War through the Cold War and the birth of the Internet to the present era of hackers and surveillance. The book is rich with historical detail and characters as well as astonishing revelations about espionage carried out in recent times by the United Kingdom, the United States, and China.

Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union

The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese codes, thereby turning the tide of Allied victory. In the postwar years, as the United States developed a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our intelligence community found itself targeting not soldiers on the battlefield, but suspected spies, foreign leaders, and even American citizens.

See No Evil

In his explosive New York Times best seller, top CIA operative Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides startling evidence of how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA's efforts to root out the world's deadliest terrorists, allowing for the rise of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the continued entrenchment of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Darknet: A Beginner's Guide to Staying Anonymous Online

Want to surf the web anonymously? This audiobook is the perfect guide for anyone who wants to cloak their online activities. Whether you're on Usenet, Facebook, P2P, or browsing the web with standard browsers like Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, I will show you how to become a ghost on the internet, leaving no tracks back to your isp, or anyone else.

Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life: A Former CIA Officer Reveals Safety and Survival Techniques to Keep You and Your Family Protected

When Jason Hanson joined the CIA in 2003, he never imagined that the same tactics he used as a CIA officer for counterintelligence, surveillance, and protecting agency personnel would prove to be essential in every day civilian life. In addition to escaping handcuffs, picking locks, and spotting when someone is telling a lie, he can improvise a self-defense weapon, pack a perfect emergency kit, and disappear off the grid if necessary. He has also honed his "positive awareness" - a heightened sense of his surroundings.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It

One of the world's leading authorities on global security, Marc Goodman takes listeners deep into the digital underground to expose the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you - and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than ever imagined.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order

Bitcoin became a buzzword overnight. A cyber enigma with an enthusiastic following, it pops up in headlines and fuels endless media debate. You can apparently use it to buy anything from coffee to cars, yet few people seem truly to understand what it is. This raises the question: Why should anyone care about bitcoin? In The Age of Cryptocurrency, Wall Street journalists Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey deliver the definitive answer to this question.

Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know

In Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know®, New York Times best-selling author P. W. Singer and noted cyberexpert Allan Friedman team up to provide the kind of deeply informative resource book that has been missing on a crucial issue of 21st-century life. Written in a lively, accessible style, filled with engaging stories and illustrative anecdotes, the book is structured around the key question areas of cyberspace and its security: how it all works, why it all matters....

Odd Thomas

"The dead don't talk. I don't know why." But they do try to communicate, with a short-order cook in a small desert town serving as their reluctant confidant. Odd Thomas thinks of himself as an ordinary guy, if possessed of a certain measure of talent at the Pico Mundo Grill and rapturously in love with the most beautiful girl in the world, Stormy Llewellyn.

Publisher's Summary

In Chatter, Patrick Radden Keefe investigates the international eavesdropping alliance known as Echelon, sorting facts from conspiracy theories to determine just how much privacy Americans unknowingly sacrifice in the name of greater security. Keefe's riveting investigation moves from a secret listening station in England's Yorkshire moors to the intelligence bureaucracies of Washington and London; from an abandoned National Security Agency base hidden in the mountains of North Carolina to the European Parliament in Brussels.

Along the way Keefe meets intelligence eavesdroppers who listen in on other people's private conversations, protestors who believe that systems like Echelon will end privacy as we know it, former senators who feel American intelligence operates without any effective legislative oversight, and the journalists who brought Echelon to light. As the struggle between national security and civil liberties becomes ever more pronounced against a backdrop of global terrorism, Chatter is sure to fire debate.

What the Critics Say

"Mr. Keefe writes, crisply and entertainingly, as an interested private citizen rather than an expert." (The New York Times) "Intelligent and polemical, Keefe's study is sure to spark some political chatter of its own." (Publishers Weekly)

It's a shame this book hasn't been more widely listened to (only 3 ratings at time of this writing, all 5 stars) because it's extremely informative and brings to light issues/events that you might not be aware of, or even think of when you consider the topic of intelligence. It's an ideal book for anyone curious about the subject, and if you're interested in learning a little from a neat non-fiction book, this one is a great choice. Just listen to the audio sample first, the narrator's voice is quite deep and maybe a little exaggerated. My mp3 player lets me select a higher playback speed so I can make the voice sound more normal and it's not a problem for me. I still highly recommend it regardless.

This is a really solid introduction to a topic I knew almost nothing about. If you want to learn something substantive about Signals Intelligence (electronic evesdropping) in an utterly painless way, this is a great download.

It's pretty well-written, and although it meanders about at times, by the time it's all done, you've had a very broad exposure to the topic.

The author here is not some privacy zealot out to do a hatchet job on the NSA. Rather, he seems to approach his topic with a genuine sense of intellectual curiousity and an understanding of the inherent trade-offs between privacy and security interests. But what emerges from this fair and frank analysis of the available information is no less troubling.

If you are concerned about your personal privacy, this book shows you have every reason to be justified in those concerns. If you aren't particularly concerned about privacy and just hope our spys manage to find a way to stay ahead of the bad guys and head off the next 9/11, you should also be very concerned about what this book has to say about the effectiveness of U.S. evesdropping capabilities.

The picture that emerges here is that of a traditional, hide-bound government bureaucracy, unable to adapt to the changes in modern communication, rather than the all-seeing, all powerful, Great Eye of the U.S. that some would have us fear.

Yet at the same time, this very bureaucracy is almost completely shielded by secrecy, and still possesses incredible power to invade our privacy, both at home and overseas.

We may have the worst of all possible worlds: an ineffective NSA that often can't actually find the bad guys, spends billions of our dollars, possesses powerful tools for the invasion of our privacy, and has been basically left to its own devices.

The book not only shows you these problems, it also gives you enough exposure to the field to understand why they all are going to be very difficult to solve.

The book does an okay job discussing some of the world of SIGINT. The book doesn't progress to solid conclusions, but as previous reviewer said, tends to jump around.

As a former SIGINT worker, I think that the book best details the goverments over reliance on technical intelligence as well as indirectly exposes the results of the brain drain of the 80's from the agencies as we left to join the "gold rush" of technology start-ups.

The best parts for me are the discussion of how public technologies have caught and surpassed NSA capabilities. There are some interesting character analysis of people who do this work. As a former traffic and crypto-analyst, I have to agree with the section on how we perceive ourselves, relative to the others within the intelligence community.

The narrator could have read a bit faster, but did a great job nonetheless.
Incredible story for those that have 'heard things' about Echelon and it's capabilities, and have fears built falsely on the listening capabilities of our government, this book helps to define many of the things they can and can't do, but also may be able to do. Terrific book!

If you are at all interested in technology or intelligence, this is definitely the book for you. I figured it was going to be a retelling of everything that we already hear on the news and the internet. However, I learned a lot of things that I didn't even fathem existed. The only reason that I gave the book a 4 out of 5 is that Keefe left me with an urge for more at the end. This was done intentionally as he admits that his book is not the "final word" on the matter, but "the first." I highly recommend it to everyone. It kept me glued to my iPod for hours per day.

One of the delights of this audiobook is the clever and deft writing. For a guy who claims he is not an investigative reporter, he sure fooled me. This audiobook is full of "Really!" moments--and it does offer a good, critical evaluation of claims, counterclaims and explanations about intelligence gathering. The narration is wonderful and even those reasonably familiar with Elint and Sigint will find a LOT here of value. You'll be recommending this audiobook to friends!

Highly overrated by prior reviewers in my mind. There are some interesting tidbits, but jumps around a lot, not really a cohesive story. I really do not need a list of listening posts around the world. The fact that the government is listening where it can is not surprising.

Chatter sheds light on many failures of the intelligence community and specifically the NSA. However, the author, fails to understand and deliver the reasons "why?". His left leaning rhetoric gets in the way of what could have been a well written evaluation of the NSA and SIGINT at large. One example, author complains about polygraph examiners instead of linguists being hired after 9/11, without understanding how the linguist needs were being met by the NSA and the agency's need for examiners instead of more linguists.

Fascinating look into how the government spies on everyone. Gives a historical good overview of eavesdropping by the NSA, and other agencies. Also discusses the ethics of eavesdropping and the debates by leaders on this issues. Very good read. Try it!